To Educate a Chef

My older daughter likes to cook. She is mastering the art of preparing nutritious delicacies such as macaroni and cheese, Mr Noodles and rice pudding. She doesn’t want my help… she wants my approval when she is finished. She wants me there when things catch fire, boil over, or don’t look like the picture on the box. But the last thing she wants from her mother right now is help. So I stay out of the kitchen. This of course poses quite a dilemma when she wants to cook something that is not on her rather short list of mastered menu items.

Apparently she has also inherited a rather large dose of creativity along with some impulsiveness that leads her to believe that recipes are actually only guidelines. Now, I am quite aware that there are many people who believe that when teaching someone how to cook, one should show him or her the proper way to do things… the home economics teacher is one of them. I understand… you certainly couldn’t have a whole classroom full of students adding extra ingredients to the cookie batter, or cutting their biscuits into bear shapes with cookie cutters. I am not a home economics teacher. I don’t mind experiments… too much. And I pity the home economics teacher that has to teach her to stick to the recipe.

A couple of weeks ago, she asked if she could make cookies. Cookies are something that is usually done with a recipe in this house. I used to make cookies with my kids when they were little, and as soon as they could read, they were put in charge of reading the recipe. She pulled out the recipe entitled “Cookie Monster’s Cookie Dough.” For some reason, with all the hundreds of recipes we must have for cookies in this house, the favorite one is from a sesame street book that I had when I was three years old.

Everything seemed to be going well with the compilation of ingredients, until I checked on her when she was almost done. The normally blonde colored shape cookies now contained chocolate chips and green food coloring. She must have used a fair amount of the food coloring, because the cookie dough was the color of Kermit the Frog or some kind of nuclear experiment. The dough was also pretty dry, and very well worked. I marveled at her ingenuity and creativity and how well she had mixed the ingredients. I was also thankful that the extra ingredients were edible. I then suggested we add peppermint flavoring. When it is so obvious that this batch of cookies already belonged in a science lab, what’s a little extra flavour? Of course, this suggestion was met with much enthusiasm.

Honestly, I was a bit skeptical when it came to cooking these little green darlings, but we did it anyways. She sat in front of the oven door, anxiously awaiting the moment when I would announce that her cookies were done and she could eat them. Fifteen minutes later, I pulled out an entire cookie sheet full of brown and green poops dotted with chocolate chips. They looked gross… exactly like poop from some poor animal, who had been digesting grass. Evidently adding green food coloring to cookie dough does not prevent the dough from turning golden brown in the oven. One more lesson learned. She of course thought they were the most marvelous things ever, and proceeded to eat the entire tray of cookies. We did decide that the rest of the cookie dough was not worth cooking and we ended up throwing it out.

My younger daughter is now attempting experiments too, although so far hers seem to be limited to the same one done over and over again. She puts cheese on a plate, spoons salsa on top and puts it in the microwave until the cheese melts… She then spoons the mess onto bread and eats it for breakfast every morning I will let her… and sometimes when I won’t. Her sister thinks it’s gross… but on a scale of grossness, it’s probably several degrees lower than the poopy cookies.

I often wonder exactly how many of these little lessons L will have to learn before she follows the recipe or her experiments become somewhat less impulsive. I remember, however, the tamale pie that my father choked down the first time I made dinner by myself, the peanut butter cookies that fell apart because I forgot the eggs, and the fried stewing chicken that I so proudly served my ex husband the first week we were married (we laughed hysterically when we found we could actually bounce it on the kitchen floor). So I guess these little experiments are necessary growth in a cooks education… if I could only teach her how to clean up after them… **sigh**